“Why I am a Catholic”

Fr Chris Ryan is an Australian friend who is a priest with the Missionaries of God’s Love, a new religious order of priests and consecrated men and women committed to the New Evangelisation. He has started a WordPress blog recently entitled Seeing Swans at Night. One of his first posts was a reflection, in the form of a letter, on why he is a Catholic. I’m sure he won’t mind if I quote most of it here, to give a contrasting response to the previous piece.

I’m a Catholic because I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is Emmanuel: God with us.

I’m a Catholic because I believe in the God that Jesus Christ reveals to us: a God of unfathomable love, beauty and goodness.

I’m a Catholic because I believe that Jesus also reveals to us what it means to be truly human.

I’m a Catholic because I believe that the Spirit of Jesus has been given to me through baptism. And as a consequence of the Spirit’s power at work in me, I know, as the deepest truth of my life, that I am so completely loved by God that the only Son of God was crucified for me and rose from the dead so that I might participate in the very life of God. This means that I experience myself as forgiven, loved even in my blackest moments. And it means that I believe I have already begun to share in the Love that is God.

I believe all this because I have discovered an inexpressible joy that bubbles up when I least expect it, a joy that emerges when it should least be present, because it is the joy of knowing that even death has been defeated by the One who was raised from the grave.

I’m a Catholic because I believe that all of what I have described above is possible because of the mediation of the Church. It is in and through the Church that I have met and continue to meet the risen Jesus. I experience the saving love of Jesus in her Sacraments and in the Scriptures. I experience the saving love of Jesus in the witness of those saints present and past, those publicly canonised and those hidden and almost unknown. In the Church’s prayer and in her action on behalf of the weakest and most vulnerable and rejected members of the human family I meet Jesus the Lord.

I’m a Catholic because the journey is better with friends; in fact they’re indispensable. Being Catholic means we’re in it together. And there’s more laughs that way.

I’m a Catholic because Catholicism takes both my brain and my body seriously. As a Catholic I neither have to leave my mind at the door of the Church nor pretend that I am an angel or merely a spirit. The Catholic faith has real intellectual depth, and yet it is not a religion of the elite but is good news for those who can become like little children.

The Catholic faith provides the only response to the reality of human suffering that comes close to doing justice to the mystery of human misery that I see in the world. For only Christian faith says that God cared enough about our agony to join us in it. And my faith does justice to my deep sense that such suffering should not be by promising that it will end, for our destiny is a life free from suffering and pain, where every tear will be wiped away. My Catholic faith commits me to the alleviation of suffering wherever I find it too.

I’m a Catholic because it offers a message of sanity and hope when many are peddling messages that are anti-human and destructive. I’m a Catholic because our faith tells me that me, you and this world are all fundamentally good, but radically damaged, and that Jesus Christ is the Healer who can return you, me and this world to wholeness and harmony.

I’m a Catholic because I value the teaching office of the Church. That’s not because I can’t think for myself, but because I trust in the wisdom that has been distilled over two thousand years and because I believe that the Lord promised to continue to guide and care for his Church.

I’m a Catholic because I know that I need to be challenged to truly love others as Jesus has loved me. The teaching of Jesus continually puts forward an ethic of radical loving that is at the same time deeply merciful and compassionate. Being Catholic means that I am challenged not to be content with mediocrity or superficiality. God means to make me whole, holy, truly human. And he won’t be content until I am.

I know too that the Church’s witness to all of this is often disfigured and that her members all too often obscure rather than proclaim the truth of God’s saving love. I know that I too don’t bear witness to Jesus as faithfully or as fully as I truly desire. That means that I cannot say that the Church’s failures are simply ‘out there’ , because I fail to love as radically as the Gospel calls me to too. The Church has never been completely faithful to her mission to bear witness to Christ. And so the Church always needs to be renewed through the power of the Spirit. But I’m convinced that the light of Jesus still shines in and through his Body the Church.

I’m a Catholic because the Catholic faith claims that Love is the meaning of the universe. I find that immensely beautiful… and true.

7 Responses

Very interesting idea. Let me share some insight. I am a former Catholic, went to Catholic schools, assisted in Catholic schools and am now not a Catholic. I see more examples of Christianity elsewhere. I see love and exceptance elsewhere. I am now searching for a church that actually has it, so far its just been regular people in situations that have it.

For a moment I stumbled over the ‘elite’ sentence…..and then stumbled over it the second time I read it too. It is not elite in the fact that it is available in some context for everyone….but it can be elite in that it is not everyone that can access it…. and/or access it in the same context or equally……even if they become a child….

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Looking across the landscape of contemporary culture - at the arts, science, religion, politics, philosophy; sorting through the jumble; seeing what stands out, what unsettles, what intrigues, what connects, what sheds light. Father Stephen Wang is a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Westminster, London. He is currently Senior University Chaplain, based at Newman House Catholic Chaplaincy. [Banner photo with kind permission of Matthew Powell]

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